Artist Teacher Partnership

ATP inspires, motivates, and engages students in learning. These programs instill self-confidence, focus, persistence, and empathy, while providing wonderful opportunities for students to learn and communicate in new ways, collaborate on projects, and build creativity and critical thinking skills.

Bringing dance, music, theatre, and visual arts to classrooms by pairing classroom teachers with SPECTRA Teaching Artists. Together, they work to integrate the arts into subjects such as ELD, math, science, and history. The residencies led by Laurel Shastri and Saki (videos below), integrate creative movement and dance with English language development, and Janas Durkee integrates the visual arts.

The program is patterned on the successful model described in “Creative Collaborations: Teachers and Artists in the Classroom”, published by The California Alliance for Arts Education, Marin County’s successful Arts Ed Demonstration Project, and Perpich’s Artful Teaching and Learning model.

The goals of the program are:

To give students high quality arts instruction, based in arts integration;

To provide professional development in arts to generalist classroom teachers; and

To develop a culture of value for arts education at the school, and build capacity for sustaining the program.

The Artist Teacher Partnership is supported by the David & Lucile Packard Foundation and California Arts Council’s Artists in Schools program.